


To Give Everything

by Ferith12



Category: DCU
Genre: Cause I'm a horrible person, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Gen, Gotham is a Twisted Twisted City, It probably happened to Dick, Sexual Abuse, Think of something terrible that could happen to a child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-07 22:39:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6828064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferith12/pseuds/Ferith12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This happened because I am evil.</p>
<p>Dick isn't adopted by Bruce Wayne.  <br/>He can't stop loving people, even though he knows this will only end terribly.</p>
<p>I don't know why I wrote this, why am I so cruel?  Also, way longer than I expected.<br/>And it seems like it wants to be a series now.  Why?  I really don't need another series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Give Everything

Dick was small and scared and alone, in a world he didn’t know.

They took him to a house that looked awe-inspiringly big to him, even though it was only medium sized.

“This nice lady is Miss Cassidy.You’ll be staying with her now,” they said.

He gave her everything.

She was nice, and she was sad, and she was lonely, and he thought she needed him.He was in a strange new world and he didn’t even speak english much, but he could tell. 

He had lost everything, all he had loved, all he had hoped for, all he had expected in life.But he thought, just maybe, he could move on and make a new life.He could certainly love her.

He knew the way she touched him wasn’t like the way his mother had.There was a voice in his head that whispered, _this is wrong_.She treated him more like a puppy than a person.But he told himself that maybe this was how people showed love in America, who knows?She told him not to try to talk because he looked cuter with his mouth shut. _Wrong_ , the voice hissed.But she was there and she was all he had, so he loved her with all his soul.

One night she made him take his clothes off.“This is how people _really_ love each other,” she said.

The voice was screaming now, but he didn’t listen.Because she was everything.And this proved she loved him, didn’t it?She’d said the word and everything.

Whenever she left she would lock him in, after that.Sometimes she left for almost a whole day, but she always came back at night.

Almost a whole year later she told him she’d be gone for a week and left, locking the door behind her.She didn’t leave any food behind for him.It was the middle of winter and she had turned off the heat before she’d left. 

On the third day he realized how _messed up_ this all was.

On the fifth he finally mustered up the courage to climb out a window and run away. 

Huddled in an ally, close to freezing to death, he cried.Not because it was cold or because he was in the big, big, ugly world and he was afraid, but because he didn’t want to leave her.Because she had done terrible, terrible things to him, and she had never once loved him, but that didn’t matter.He had given her everything, and never once asked for anything in return.

 

Child Protective Services caught him again just as it was starting to get warmer, which was just typical. 

They sent him to live with a man in an old, rundown house who was almost always drunk.Dick knew he only wanted him there for the money that was supposed to go to Dick.But sometimes the man would give him a companionable smile, and he kept him warm and mostly fed and clothed.So even though he knew better now, Dick gave him everything.Because his soul was just too starving for other people and full of love not to.

When he first came to that house he was starving and scared and still didn’t speak much English.He walked around, silent, with his soul half dead, broken.But as time went on, with a person he loved with all his heart, who he could do things for, like wash dishes and scrub floors, he slowly began to heal.

The man didn’t like that. 

The man wanted a boy who was silent and basically nonexistent.A perfect, effort free source of money.He did not want a little circus acrobat who laughed and joked and couldn’t keep both feet on the ground for five seconds.He tried not to do those things, because he would do anything for the man, but he couldn’t just not be himself, so sometimes he slipped up.After a while the man decided that the best way to keep him out of his hair was to lock him in the basement.He gave him food and water, but sometimes he forgot.

Dick didn’t blame him.Because he couldn’t, he’d given him everything.And if the man punished him he must have done something wrong.

But he just couldn’t stay there, trapped in the dark, with nothing to do, nowhere to _move_ , no one to talk to, no one to even _coexist_ with.So he picked the lock and and ran away again, promising himself he would never let the CPS catch him again.

He hated himself for leaving the man.After all, he had never done anything _bad_ to him, and Dick had given him everything.

 

A teenaged boy saw Dick hopping rooftops a few months later.He was cool and he seemed to care, and Dick knew he was bad news, but he gave him everything anyway. Soon Dick was carrying drugs all across Gotham and almost getting shot full of holes every day. When the boy was killed he blamed himself, and then moved on.

 

For all he was terrible at not loving everyone he met with all his heart, he was incredibly good at moving on. 

 

That winter he almost froze to death.A kind woman took him in, and he gave her everything.Then she made him do the love thing again with strangers who gave her money.Three months later he ran again, broken and full of guilt and missing the way she would smile at him sometimes when a client had been especially pleased, missing her so much it hurt.

 

He flew and he stole and he did it so well that he made a name for himself.And he laughed, because he was Dick Grayson and he was alive.But he tried to stay away from people.

 

He met a little girl about his age who was alone and scared.He took her home to the abandoned, half-collapsed apartment he was staying in, and shared his food with her.He gave her everything.She stayed with him for a month, until she thought he trusted her, (really, he’d trusted her from the moment she’d asked him for help, even though he’d also known she was hiding something from him) she sedated him and gave him to a gang that had put out a bounty for the famous boy who could steal anything from anyone, and flew across rooftops.

 

The leader of the gang pretty much adopted him.He taught him to fight, and to be obedient and loyal, and how to survive on the streets, and he was cruel and brutal about it. He beat Dick, sometimes teaching him to fight, sometimes as discipline, and sometimes just for fun.But he also sometimes acted like the closest thing to a father he had had since his real one had died.When he was told to kill a member of a rival gang, Dick didn’t.He ran again, and this time he knew his choice had been morally right, and he didn’t regret it in the least.But he still missed the man and everyone he had known in the gang terribly.

 

He was even better at what he did now, and surviving was almost easy.He promised himself he wouldn’t love again.

 

It was winter again and he was thirteen, five whole years since his parents died.He saw a boy a little younger than him, sitting on a doorstep, doing that thing where he just shook a little, because he was beyond the point where tears worked.

“Hey, you alright?”Dick asked, against his better judgement.

“Ain’t none of your business,” the kid snapped.

“Sure, whatever,” Dick said, and moved on, because he was _not_ letting himself get attached. 

A week later Dick found him again in an ally near the doorstep, half frozen to death. 

“What’s you’re name, kid?” he asked bluntly, because his social skills were pretty much dead at this point.

“I thought I told you to leave me alone, weirdo,” the kid said, fierce and full of bravado, but Dick could see he was scared. 

_here we go again,_ a small part of his brain said.

“I’ve got a place not far from here,” he said, scribbling the address, in the grime that covered everything in Gotham, with his finger,“There’s no heat but it’s shelter and I’ve got plenty of blankets.You’re welcome to it any time.”

The boy gave him a pretty impressive death glare, “You think I’m an idiot?”

_No, the only idiot here is me,_ Dick thought.

“Just think about it,” Dick said as he left, taking of his coat (a new one he’d stolen for that winter) and leaving it for the kid.

Dick knew the boy wouldn’t take him up on his offer, but it wouldn’t be the last he’d see of him.Because Dick was incredibly stubborn, and he’d just given that boy everything.


End file.
